


Steve Adopts Post IW

by justanotherStonyfan



Series: Mission Fics [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Adoption, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canonical Character Death, Children, M/M, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22218649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherStonyfan/pseuds/justanotherStonyfan
Summary: In the wake of the snap, children worldwide were left without parents, suddenly the orphanages and foster systems were overwhelmed, especially with half the social workers missing. And so he heard himself, one afternoon. He heard his own voice say,“I’ll take one,”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Mission Fics [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599379
Comments: 44
Kudos: 344





	Steve Adopts Post IW

**Author's Note:**

> **Written for MomNicole, see end notes for more info**  
>  Major character deaths both permanent and temporary as per Endgame

She looks, as fate would have it, like Bucky. Of course. She couldn’t look like anyone else, it’s how the world works with him. He’d say it’s what endears her to him first of all, but he loves her because she’s small and she’s his and he couldn’t do anything but love her - how she looks is nothing to do with it.

And it’s not that he can see much of Bucky in her. She’s a baby, there isn’t much of anything in her yet. And they’d talked for so long about a child. Together over ten years in years-lived, over seventy chronologically, they’d talked about children. Bucky always thought he couldn’t handle a child, always thought he’d hurt one. Steve…Steve longed for a little one to call their own, but he wouldn’t pick one over Bucky. It wasn’t enough to drive a wedge between them. And Bucky always said ‘one day, maybe’ until one day maybe was ‘yes.’ 

But it wasn’t to be.

But now, holding her in his arms, dark hair and gray eyes, there’s something about her. She’s not so much a Rogers, though he’ll give her the name and hope he can be worthy enough for her to wear it with love and pride - but no. A smile like that smile, as he gives his own in return though it’s watery and weak, though it wobbles on his face, that smile, her smile, she’s a Barnes. 

In the wake of the snap, children worldwide were left without parents, suddenly the orphanages and foster systems were overwhelmed, especially with half the social workers missing. And so he heard himself, one afternoon. He heard his own voice say,

“I’ll take one,” like she was some sort of commodity to be dished out, like he could walk up to a counter and place an order. 

She didn’t have parents before the snap, either, he learned, fifty-fifty one way or the other. Half of them in the system because they were always in the system, half of them in the system now they had no parents to go home to. Little, alone, she’d been left in the system a week or so before the snap by chance, by way of one overdose and one abandonment. And he asked her name, what name had she been given?

By birth? No name. One parent left, the other dead, she’d been left with nothing - but the system? What did they call her?

A light in the darkness, hope in the wake of the worst event the universe had ever seen. 

“Becky,” they said, as fate would have it. Of course. “Rebecca.”

It won’t be any hardship to care for her. He loves her already.

“My girl,” he murmurs now, hope, fate, destiny cradled safe and burbling quiet in the crook of his elbow, and she smiles at his voice, she stares at his eyes. “My Becky. My Becca.”

***

There isn’t much to Avenge. Besides the loss of everyone they called friends, the world has to move on, and it’s too busy pulling itself back together. They’ll never stop looking for a way to undo it but Steve knows, Steve has been here before. Steve has woken up alone and without his life, friends, family, world, he knows sometimes the best that you can do is to start over. He’ll never give up hope, but he won’t hold his breath, either. 

She is not too much for him. He worries at first that she will be, that he’ll have no patience with her, that he’ll be lost for what to do with her. Diapers are disgusting, bathing is a rollercoaster, sleep is hesitant and intermittent but Bucky’s little siblings were all just like this. Steve remembers taking care of them when they were heavy on his hip and murder on his back. Rebecca is a feather in his arms, and red-faced when she’s hungry, and he sits with his eyes half closed and his ears ringing, at the kitchen table, in the middle of the night, Rebecca cradled against his chest while she drinks her formula and stares right up at him. She screamed her head off an hour ago because, who knows, she just decided she was going to, he guesses. She was right there by the bed, but it doesn’t seem to comfort her that he falls asleep with his hand in the cot, with her hand wrapped around the tip of his little finger. 

It comforts him. 

And holding her close and feeding her, or showing her the lights that remain in the city, or the sunrise, or the sunset, or the paintings on his wall, or the pictures that hang in his corridors.

“And this was your Uncle Sam, and this was your Auntie Wanda. And this, my darling, this was your Daddy. My Bucky.”

She chews her fingers until they’re wet with saliva and burbles, and he smiles, eyes stinging.

“My Becca,” he tells her, and he sings her half-remembered lullabies and tells her half-forgotten stories. 

“You talk to her like she understands you,” Nat tells him softly one afternoon, while he’s spooning orange mush into Becca’s little pink mouth.

“…and it tastes good too! Ahhh,” he says, making the face as the airplane arrives at the hangar. Becca slaps her chubby hands together and gets half of it down her bib when she laughs with her mouth full, and he’s never seen anything more wonderful in his life. “That’s because she can to an extent, can’t she?” he smiles without looking at Natasha. “Yes she can!”

She smiles, too, giggling, slapping the tray of her high chair.

“I know,” Nat tells him, just as gently. “It was a compliment.”

The papers ridiculed it. _Captain America, Wanted Fugitive. Should the Failed Avenger Raise a Baby?_

Sometimes he’d think about it, mostly when he’d fed her and bathed her and changed her diaper and walked around and read and sang and she _still_ wouldn’t stop crying. But then, necessity ignored, the aching, crying desperation of a broken world aside, morning, or evening, or just a few hours later would come, and she’d be curled up in her cot, or in his arms, small and warm and fragile and his. Theirs, if only Bucky could have seen her. The right decision, his whole world in his arms.

***

He’s attending a conference when she vomits down his back. He doesn’t notice, and it’s not until one of the junior scientists points it out that he sees.

He sighs, grabs a napkin. This was a good suit. Maybe it’ll dry clean. 

“Good job I love you, isn’t it?” he says, but it’s wry, he’s smiling, and Becca, wiggling happily against his chest, couldn’t care less about any of it.

She’ll need feeding again, as long as it’s not a bug. 

“Little longer windin’ you next time, huh, baby girl?” he murmurs to her. “Excuse me,” he says to the rest of them.

He doesn’t look back. 

***

Natasha her Godmother, Thor her Godfather, there’d be no-one else he’d want in his stead should more tragedy befall them, and Becca burbles her way from happy squeals and raspberries to consonants and patterns. He tells her everything he can think of, and she laughs and says Bah and Wah and Mah and Dah, and then Dah becomes Dada and he doesn’t hear it at first. She says it twice and he’s cutting a banana into slices when it suddenly rings in his ears, and his head whips around - he stares at her.

She giggles, hands covered in mashed potato, face covered in more of the same.

“Me?” he says, throat rough, eyes stinging.

“Dada!” she says a third time.

_Him._

He plucks her from her chair and spins her around and tears streak his face as she laughs. When he kisses her messy cheeks, she laughs. When he sets her against his shoulder, she puts her messy fingers on his shirt and tells him again, and he laughs too. Then she tries to leap out of his arms because _banana,_ and he sniffs as he shakes his head.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says “You got it, baby girl.”

***

She’s smart. Good God, is she ever. She’s attentive and precocious and he reads her science fiction and fantasy, Narnia and Moria, Mars and Jupiter, the depths and the heights and he reads it before she can understand it, but it’s not long before she’s getting the gist. She loves it, all of it, just like her father did. He says so sometimes.

“No Bappy?” she says, because Bucky was Daddy until Daddy meant Steve.

“No, sweetheart,” he says, hitching her higher on his hip before he puts his hand on his heart. “Bappy’s in here now.”

She puts her hand over his hand, tiny - her fingers can wrap around one of his, his thumb and forefinger can circle her wrist - and then on her own heart.

“Bappy,” she says, and he looks at the photograph of Bucky on their wall.

“Yeah,” he says. 

***

Pre-school is hard. It’s difficult in a world of people finding it difficult - people just like Steve (Steve is just like those people now) gather at the gates and wipe away tears. Most are single parents now, one or two are newly only-children. 

“Melanie,” says one guy - he knows who Steve is, but there are more important things to think of than that these days. “She…had a twin.” Melanie’s dad smiles, but there’s no joy behind it. “It’s just Mel and me now,” he says, and Steve nods.

“Yeah,” he says and then, because he can’t think of anything else, “yeah.”

***

She draws big blue bubbles with scraggy yellow hair and a lopsided star in egg-shaped circles, and he puts it on the refrigerator. Her math homework is hard and he sits in the kitchen after vegetable lasagna and a bowl of apple slices and yoghurt, and they work through it together. 

“But why?” she says, and he explains, they use their fingers. 

Then they don’t need to use their fingers. The pencil looks huge in her hand, and all her worksheets come back with huge green smiley-faces on them.

“Like Uncle Bruce!” she says, and he laughs.

“Just like Uncle Bruce,” he says. 

***

He reads her story - it’s five lines long and it’s about daddy going to magic land, with magic spelled with a ‘j’ and another scraggy blond bubble-Steve. 

“I love it,” he says, and he wraps his arms around her in the dress Natasha bought her, and he puts it on the refrigerator next to her other masterpieces. “I’m so proud of you. I love you so much.”

He tells her every day.

***

The world is not without its problems. There comes a time, of course, where they’re called on. He doesn’t wear the suit - he wears black and hides his face, a new Winter Soldier, he thinks hysterically. Nobody wants to see the uniform anymore - Steve least of all of them. He bleeds, and it hurts, but she knows.

“What happens if you don’t come back, Daddy?” she says, and he shakes his head.

Auntie Nat will take care of you, he wants to tell her. Uncle Thor will keep you safe. 

“I can’t do this any more,” he says to Rhodey instead, and Rhodey nods. 

“Yeah, man,” he says. “I mean, yeah.”

And so he doesn’t. He won’t. She lost so much before she was born, and so did he - he lost everything, and then there was she. She’s his world now, she has to be, and he’s hers.

“I’ll always come back to you, sweetheart,” he says, because he will now. “My Becca.”

“Busy Becca,” she says, and he laughs, sends her on her way to play with her dolls and her trucks and her little cat figures. 

His Busy Becca, his little girl. Their daughter. 

***

“And Daddy says Bappy was really strong, too.”

They don’t do Santa. Steve was standing in line at the grocery store before he’d even gotten Becca, near that first Christmas. Nobody smiled that Christmas. He heard stories of kids asking for mommies and daddies back, for brothers and sisters, for cousins and aunts and uncles. People stopped asking “What do you want for Christmas?” because nobody could give what was wanted.

“And he asked me,” said the lady behind him in the grocery line, voice wavering, “if _Santa_ turned to dust!” She laughs. “For God’s sake, his baby brother was three days old and turned to nothing in my arms, and he’s asking me about _Santa!?”_

So Santa doesn’t bring presents for Steve’s daughter - Steve does, and the wonderful family they have left. The Aunts and Uncles who love her so, they give her gifts at Christmas. And he takes her to church with him on Christmas Day and they eat together as a family, the family they’ve made. When she turns eighteen, he’ll give her something of Bucky’s - he doesn’t yet know what. But he’ll want her to have a part of him, the way Steve carries part of him each day.

“Are you really tall?”

Everything leads to everything with three-year-olds. She asks Thor if he’s tall because Bappy was tall, and Bappy was tall because Daddy’s tall, and Daddy’s tall because Daddy’s strong, and Daddy’s strong because Daddy eats his vegetables, which they were talking about because Rebecca did not want to eat hers.

“I am,” Thor answers. “I am amongst the tallest of our friends. And do you know how I come to be so tall?”

Steve catches his eye and has to look away to keep from laughing. 

“Why?” Becca asks, her voice small and awed.

“Because I ate all my vegetables when I was young,” he says, and Steve covers his mouth.

And then he realizes how long it’s been since he had to fight not to laugh. It’s a good feeling.

***

He thinks about another one. A little boy he could call James - he and Becca could talk about it, decide whether she wants a big brother or a little one. But it doesn’t feel right. It feels, he realizes, like trying to put a square peg in the round hole in his heart. A sibling would be wonderful for her, and they’ll talk about it soon. Now that she’s four, now that she’s talking about puppies and playtime, now would be a good time to talk about it. But he has to keep it in mind, has to put her best interests first.

Bucky would have loved her _so much._

“Daddy,” she says, “Lydia says only ladies can make babies. And sometimes it’s a accident.”

Steve narrows his eyes before he schools his expression and looks back at her.

 _“An_ accident, honey, it starts with an ‘a’ so we use an ‘an,’” and correcting her buys him time.

“Lydia says sometimes it’s _an_ accident,” she says instead.

“That’s true,” he says, because he’s not about to clarify that it takes two to ‘make’ a baby for the purposes of this conversation, when she’s clearly talking about gestation.

There’s a silence during which he can hear her thinking.

“So,” she says, “then…was I a, an accident?” and he smiles.

This one he’s had up his sleeve for a long time. 

“No, sweetheart, I picked you,” he says. “I wanted you so badly. I wanted a Busy Becca _so much,_ I chose you out of everybody else.”

“You picked me?” she says. “From a store?”

He tilts his head.

“It was nicer than a store,” he says, and he turns around and picks her up, boops her nose so she giggles. “It’s called ‘adoption.’ I didn’t make you but I picked you right out. You’re my Busy Becca.”

“And so,” she says, “do I have a mommy?”

And Steve draws a breath in through his nose.

“Only ladies can have babies,” he says. “A lady had you. And I’m your Daddy, because I picked you because I wanted you. Because I love you more than anything. Mommies aren’t the same as ladies.”

“So there was Bappy instead of a mommy?”

Steve nods, blows out a breath - that’ll do.

“Yeah,” he says. “Daddy and Bappy.”

“But Bappy’s gone now,” she says, and this hurts, this one he wasn’t prepared for.

“Yeah,” he says. “So you got just a Daddy instead.”

She brightens, straightens her little spine.

“Okay!” she says, beaming, apparently satisfied. “I’m’onna tell Lydia she could have been an accident.”

Steve laughs though his eyes sting.

“Ha, maybe hold off on that one, kiddo,” he says. 

***

It’s agony. Sleepless nights and wearing days, dropped toys and temper tantrums, stomach bugs and thrown food and headaches, protesting joints, bruised feet from sleepwalking with her on his shoulder. For every time she smiles, she cries just as hard, for every time she shows him a picture, she won’t eat her greens, for every time she’s heaven, it’s hell, but she smiles and she draws and she’s heaven and she’s his, she’s his, and he loves her more than life itself, he wouldn’t change it for the world, the solar system, the galaxy.

But half a universe?

When Natasha calls him, there’s only one thing he wants to know.

“Will it undo everything, or will it bring everything back?”

And she says the worst thing he’s ever heard.

“We don’t know.”

And then he does the worst thing he’s ever done. 

What he has to do.

***

“When are you coming back, Daddy?” she asks, and he smiles, he has to smile, he _has_ to smile.

It’s been five years and, if the stones take back everything…

“I’ll see you soon, baby,” he says into her hair. “I love you more than life, more than anything. Okay?”

She’s drawing, scribbling a dog. She wants a dog. 

“Okay,” she says. “See you soon, Daddy.”

***

When it’s over, 

When it’s done,

When they’ve stood and faced their deaths a thousand times, when the ground has torn beneath them and the forces Thanos sent have beaten them down,

When he’s stood alone and stood surrounded, when they’ve fought and won, and lost as well, 

The air is still. 

The universe stands still for Tony Stark.

And then, like dams breaking, the lost are found. The dead are risen, and his little girl, his Becca, she’s there, she’s safe, he drops to his knees and he weeps into thick, dark hair, she cries, runs to him and cries and cries, like a baby’s first breath, a scream of existence -

She’s _terrified._ He is so, so grateful that’s she’s alive to be terrified.

“I love you baby,” he whispers, his lungs tight and his grief a living thing inside him, “I love you.”

And she sniffs into his shoulder, her tiny fists clenched tight in his uniform, her dress from Nat, oh Nat, turned dark with dust, and her crying slows.

She says a single word, just one, and Steve’s chest breaks open, Steve’s resolve crumbles to ash, he hears footsteps pause behind him, and she lifts her head from his shoulder and says,

“Bappy?”

He 

_weeps_

***

She and Morgan are playing tag-with-variables and thank God Becca’s just as interested in numbers as she is in art - Steve can barely wrap his head around the concept but they’re happy as clams.

Pepper’s given him iced tea and Bucky sits at the garden table with Nathan on his shoulder, hand warm on Nathan’s back. 

“Careful!” Steve calls, because Becca and Morgan are running around and Steve’s perpetually terrified something will happen to one or other of them.

Half the universe is relearning how not to live in fear and Steve finds some days easier than others.

Sam gets back up to participate.

“Tickle monster’s break is over!” he says as he lopes across the grass, and the girls squeal, speed up in opposite directions.

“Relax,” Bucky tells Steve softly, and Steve looks at him. They often sit like this - hands joined, fingers twined, thighs touching - and now is no exception. Bucky rubs his metal thumb over the back of Steve’s hands. “They’re fine. Little kids bounce. Remember the back of Carlo’s in thirty-one?”

“I’m not sure bounce was the right word for what I did,” Steve answers, shaking his head as Sam grabs their daughter and lifts her over his head, yelling about having caught her, which she loves. “I swear, they’re gonna turn me old and gray, and then you won’t find me attractive any more.”

Bucky chuckles and leans sideways for a kiss, brief, and Nathan bubbles at his mouth and burbles happily in the shade - Steve kisses the back of his peach-fuzzy head before he straightens up again.

“Nah,” Bucky tells him when they part, smiling - not smirking - at him, and his metal fingers are strong and sure in Steve’s as he lifts them to his mouth and kisses Steve’s knuckles. “Never gonna happen.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you're interested in getting me to write something for you, head on over to [my tumblr!](https://justanotherstonyfan.tumblr.com)


End file.
